Post from @gregpauly
Love in the Time of Coronavirus: The Alligator Lizard Version*
With days getting longer and temperatures increasing, we are entering alligator lizard mating season, and we need your help to study their mating activity.
Five years ago, we realized that we could use crowdsourcing as a way to study mating behavior. At that time, there were only three dates reported in the scientific literature for when Southern Alligator Lizards had been observed breeding. We knew we could get more observations through community science, by crowdsourcing the study of this rarely documented behavior. We started asking people to send us photos and videos of mating pairs. We have now accumulated 360 observations of mating Southern Alligator Lizards, and 57 observations of mating Northern Alligator Lizards. We are pretty sure that through community science, we have generated the largest dataset ever on lizard mating!
What does mating behavior look like? Typically the male is biting the head and neck region of the female as you can see in these previous observations of mating behavior submitted to the RASCals project:
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/22789660 (observation by @janegao)
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/22533784 (9% of observations involve multiple males and a female)
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/22517665
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/24207931
What have we learned with all these observations? Here are three discoveries so far.
What to look for? During mating season, males search out females. The male bites the female on her neck or head and may hold her this way for several days. Early in the encounter, the two may engage in a bit of a wrestling match (if you see this, please try to get videos). Sometimes, a second male shows up and we get even more interesting observations!
When to look? Because we have accumulated so many observations, we now know that the Southern Alligator Lizard mating season can start as early as early February in the southern part of the range and continues into early June in the northern part of the range and at higher elevations. In Southern California, most of the breeding activity is between mid March and late April. This year, the season is just getting started in late March, and mating pairs should be found in coastal Southern California through early May, with mating in more northern and higher elevation locations throughout May and June. For the Northern Alligator Lizard, breeding should start in early to mid April and continue through mid-June, again with lizards in the south and at lower elevation populations breeding earlier.
Where to look? Alligator lizards can be found from coastal sand dunes to high elevations in our mountains. And they do better than any other local lizard in urban areas. When in the bite hold, pairs are often found out in the open, on driveways, sidewalks, lawns, and in yards. It is also possible to find pairs several feet off the ground on fences and in shrubs.
How to document? Take photos! If the pair is actively wrestling, please take video as well. We are especially interested in how long pairs remain in the mating hold, so please check back every few hours and search for the pair in the general area.
If you see courting or mating alligator lizards, please upload photos to iNaturalist. If you are in Southern California, please tag observations to the RASCals project.
*With apologies to the late Gabriel Garcia Marquez for playing off the title of his excellent novel.
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